Brighter Futures!

I’m very pleased to report that the news is all good in this neck of the woods. Onward and upward for 2015!

Here at Dane County TimeBank (DCTB) we are a proud recipient of a Brighter Futures grant, which is state money coming through Dane County to several community partners (us, the YWCA, Briarpatch Youth Services) to build up restorative justice and opportunity-building resources in South and Southwest Madison while creating the communications and training resources to help law enforcement more effectively access those resources. And evaluating as we go and creating things with an eye toward replicability. This secures half of my job (it’s been pretty unclear where my job security would come from next year) and dovetails beautifully with work I need to do for MANs overall. I’m really hoping it also helps open some beautiful opportunities to partner with people in St. Louis, Detroit, and other communities ready to take positive action against our racist criminal system.

And things are going swimmingly toward launching MANs. Allied Community Coop (likely our first local version of a MAN – Allied Coop is up and running but I won’t call it a MAN until MAN membership is available and folks can make a formal decision about it) is cranking up, we have several other pilot sites working on the Memorandum of Agreement we’ll be signing with each other, and fantastic people lining up to participate.

You can learn more at a 3-hour web meeting being scheduled now, to be held sometime between now and Dec. 19.

Sign up here if you’d like to receive MAN email updates and invitations. If you receive emails already sign up on our official e-list – I’ll soon stop sending to the random lists of people I’ve generated over time.

Help the MAN out

Testimonials:

The best part of my job as Creative Director of Mutual Aid Networks is reminding people that we can dream bigger and better than we’re used to, that we don’t need to be bound by a scarcity mindset, and working together we can make our big dreams into reality.
- Stephanie Rearick, Madison, WI